The Cody Rivers Show
written by Bri Pruett
Everyone remembers their first time. Andrew Connor smirks at the audience with confidence in a white and red tuxedo, trimmed with red sequins; Mike Mathieu struts on stage with an equally flashy tux and an air of cockiness and gravitas. Wordlessly, they pull a woman up from the audience, seat her in a chair on the stage front and center. It is Fall 2006 and I’m attending Sketchfest Seattle, a widely attended sketch comedy festival. The Cody Rivers Show is playing to an audience who have been assaulted with wordy, premise-based sketches all night. As the semi-willing audience member giggles nervously in her chair, we hear the opening notes of Queen’s Good Old- Fashioned Loverboy, as Andrew and Mike launch into the most ornate physical performance of the evening, a show-stopping dance number, featuring double cartwheels, high kicks and giant smiles. It was an altogether unforgettable image and a moment that confirmed for me what is great about live sketch comedy. Some sketch troupes rely on an audience’s collective tension and confusion to eventually make laughter bubble to the surface. Andrew and Mike are not in that kind of Sketch duo; they are true showmen.
They’ve performed in 27 cities over the past two years. They tour constantly, bringing their show to cities throughout the country, often sleeping on the producer’s couch. Their shows are physically demanding; combining elements of dance, comedy, theater, and music. They are the pride of the Pacific Northwest. They are The Cody Rivers Show. They are getting a lot of attention from Fringe Festivals and the national sketch circuit. They are a sketch duo only by description. The Cody Rivers Show is to sketch comedy, what opera is to musical theater: surreal, lyrical fantasy world with fiercely committed characters.
In the past they’ve used props and costumes, but they scaled back the production in their 2007 Stick to Glue tour. Only their descriptions, faces and spectacularly abstract movement provides the visual backdrop to emotionally rich and character driven scenes. The characters in their shows have absurd physical characteristics, often a weird voice or posture. In many of their sketches the guys move in synchronicity, sometimes in close proximity to each other, giving the appearance of a single, hilarious, two-headed comedy monster.
Four Years ago Mike Mathieu and Andrew Connor were offered a show from the independent iDiOM Theater in Bellingham, Washington. After the first year they had six episodes of their entirely original show and were getting great responses from the audience, so they decided to do it full time. “Four years later there still isn’t a lot of room for anything else,” says Mike Mathieu. They didn’t set out to do sketch, Andrew Connor explains, “To us, what it meant was that we could do whatever we wanted and call it sketch as long as it was at least, sort of, vaguely funny. We’ve always used that label as a cover, in a sense, because it is such a malleable art form we’ve always found that we can use it as an avenue to get anything out or explore anything we want creatively.”
Their non-traditional take on sketch comedy has landed them numerous invitations to sketch festivals, where their unusual format, seamless transitions and visual fluidity stands-out. Amongst the nervous, fleshy, sweaty, sketch comedians, these two guys sparkle like sharp-tongued ballet dancers.
They met at Ohio Wesleyan University and spent a year getting to know each other, “goofing around and playing Frisbee and talking in funny voices all day,” describes Mathieu. They then performed with an improv troupe, The Babbling Bishops. The two gelled immediately. Connor elaborates: “The things that Mike and I thought were funny, the things that we jived on were validated by other people… this isn’t just our personal inside joke, being ridiculous, entertaining ourselves; there’s the broader appeal that it took another ten years to act on”
When they began developing their stage show they drew upon their training and education. Dance, movement, and music is central to The Cody Rivers Show. They develop the show together; Mathieu explains their process: “We don’t work with a director or any outside eye really, and sometimes I’m sure that’s an impediment. I think that’s the culture of the show. There’s this inertia when we go off in private, more or less, for a month or two. We don’t actually, like, go to a cottage or something, but the rest of our lives shut down and we become ghosts here in Bellingham.” Their intense private rehearsals pay off big-time with sketches that are tightly scripted and rehearsed. Not many comedians challenge themselves with extremely complicated, lengthy, lyrical speeches that must be delivered impeccably, often times in tandem. It doesn’t look forced and you wouldn’t give it another thought unless you were asked to. They aren’t just funny as so many comedians are, they’ve got physical discipline, well-trained articulation, great voice and commitment. In a phrase: they’ve got theater chops.
The Cody Rivers Show is a sophisticated a theater experience, but these guys don’t hail from a large-scale comedy scene the likes of Chicago and NYC. Connor says of their headquarters in Bellingham, Washington, “There’s no norm up here for what happens in comedy, because there’s not a lot of comedy happening...” Seattle and Vancouver have played host to the duo on multiple occasions, but the theater audience in Bellingham have been unconditionally supportive. Matthieu and Connor say that the iDiOM theater is in part to thank for cultivating a community of avid theater-goers. When the duo launched in the fall of 2004, Mike Mathieu explains, “We were on at midnight originally and we got moved to eight o’clock and it just caught on in a way that nothing else at the theater was really catching on. Luckily there was this crescendo in attendance. We thought, ‘Let’s put it in the fore front, and put everything else on hold for four years.”
On constant touring and absentia from his community, Mathieu comments: “I think my ties with friends, activities, organizations here, come and go as I’m not always around...(but) we also meet lots of great people. And so, our social world is both kind of limited and assisted by our show, and the shape of our career. The people in Bellingham are very, very supportive of us.” Four years and many successful nationwide tours later, the duo has more on their plate and has set the bar higher for their shows. After four years of non-stop performances they are taking a reduced schedule in 2009, which for them means “we won’t be performing every single weekend of the year...”
After being embraced by the sketch community as a whole and receiving national and international applause for their show, Connor and Mathieu remain loyal to their hometown, despite the beckoning from friends in bigger comedy hubs. When asked why they haven’t moved to a bigger city, Connor responds: “We can really count on a really high degree of consistent support for what we do here. This is a great place to do new work, people really embrace all our weird experiments and efforts. Also I really feel like it’s a great place for us to exist outside of a scene. There are a lot of benefits to a bustling theater comedic scene, but I think that ultimately there’s a kind of an echo chamber effect that doesn’t breed a whole lot of innovation.” Practical concerns like a low-cost of living (an important trait for full-time sketch comedians in the wake of economic fallout) and an eager and devoted fan base in Bellingham keep ‘Cody Rivers’ settled in Washington State. Mathieu comments on the duo’s values: “One of the fundamental bedrock things about our creative process has been not doing anything that’s even remotely like things we have seen… what they’ve done in comedy gets crossed off our list of what we can do. So we’re trying really hard not to emulate anybody, past or present.”
This shared artistic value is as important as the special chemistry between Andrew and Mike, observable to anyone who has ever seen them perform. “We have to throw ourselves into it, to give the show a rollercoaster feeling...” Mike Mathieu says of their format. The pair are tight off-stage too, living together in “...a bustling house full of people.” When asked, they talk about each other with reverence and affection. “I think Andrew is good at being the fun-loving acceptor,” Mike says of his stage partner, “He’s very flexible and totally takes to heart those things that we tell ourselves ‘nothing we do is a mistake.’ “ “I consider Mike peerless among the people I’ve met in terms of, like, a really sharp understanding about what needs to happen to make something work... He’s a remarkable diagnostician...” Andrew adds, “And he’s tall enough that I get to be the short one.”
Bri Pruett is a writer and performer from Portland, Oregon.
For more on the group, visit CodyRivers.com.